


golden yet for some boy i’ll never meet

by reconvenings



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Character Study, Coming of Age, M/M, asian americana, he is canon TO ME, implied sex, korean adoptee eddie, pov: you are reading my repurposed diaspora poetry welcome to my trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:41:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28645410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconvenings/pseuds/reconvenings
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak grows up in the home of the brave.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 23
Kudos: 121





	golden yet for some boy i’ll never meet

**Author's Note:**

> **warnings for: racial slurs; references to war, gun violence, and suicide; abusive parent; suggestion of underage sex**  
> 
> 
> title from ocean vuong’s _on earth we're briefly gorgeous_

"I’m saving your life," says his mother, because she’s not his real mother. "When you got here, you were so weak and sick and dirty. They don’t take care of their babies over there, you know. They left you. They abandoned you. But I would never do that to you, Eddie dear. You wouldn’t do that to me either, would you?"

The only person he knows who’s even been to Asia is Ben’s dad and he went there to kill people and when he came back he drank all the time until one day he shot himself in the head. "That’s what I’m protecting you from," Mommy says. The dirty commies and the parasites in the water. They’ll get into your brain and make you crazy and convince you to take your temperature with the barrel of a gun. 

_The commies or the parasites?_ Eddie never asks, because he doesn’t ask, not in his split-level still-life house dressed in moth-bitten lace curtain and Sears catalog wallpaper gone to seed.

What he does is: run outside with the kids down the block, ride their bikes too fast down a hill, watch them strap their boyhood across their chests, apple pie and yankee doodle. Hollers after them, trilling "Bill!" and "Stan!" and "Richie!", his mockingbird voice racing to catch up to the gleaming, streaming lines of their minutemen silhouettes.

They play Rambo at the quarry and Eddie stands up and yells, "I’m gonna kill those gooks," and it echoes and echoes in his head for decades, even after the rest of the memory has drained away. He thinks he killed the one inside of him after all.

+

"It’s a white Christmas," says the announcer on the radio after the Bruins game, and they look outside and it’s true, the whole world covered in it, ivory, alabaster, and pale.

Richie unzips his snow pants and whizzes all over the field. Eddie’s screaming, "You’re gonna freeze your dick off, you actual numbnuts," as Richie’s helicoptering forward, heavy artillery in his hands. Stan dares him to stick it on a telephone pole but Richie’s already tucked back in, right before Eddie can get caught staring, white-knuckled and red-handed inside the sodden blue yarn of his pilling wool mitten.

Richie’s packing the snow into regulation baseballs and lobbing them into the air. It’s a good thing he’s got a buttered noodle for an arm and a pair of busted taillights for eyes. Bill rushes him from behind and tackles him face-first into the plush chenille blanket of snow so Richie’s entire right cheek skids about a foot forward, cuts right through it like an advancing plow. Eddie goes next, pulls Stan down with him, their limbs wheeling all furious in the air. They press their bodies into the crush of each other’s living forms, Eddie with his pyrite flesh next-door and glittering. "It’s a Charlie Brown dogpile!" Richie cheers. Eddie’s got ice in his eyes and he doesn’t look too close but when he braces their arms together he feels them fit solid and same. He forgets for the entire afternoon until he comes home and unwraps himself layer by layer and he’s looking back from the other side of the mirror and he’s yellow underneath, just like the snow.

+

"We all know Eddie has the smallest wang," says Richie. He pulls the fragile corners of his eyes up and to the side until Stan chops him in the arm and Eddie kicks him in the shin.

Mike is there and sometimes, they stop and grin loonily at each other, members of a secret club’s secret club. Most times, they both know it’s not the same. Eddie thinks he’s beginning to understand the ugly, grasping things inside of himself that claw forward and beg to see someone else squirm. He’s learned what it takes to feed them.

It's dark out at the farm and he says, "Mike, are you there? I can’t see you," and Mike doesn't hit him because he's not a hitter, not like Eddie with his why-I-oughta-fists balled up and pistoning in place, but he does flick him on the nose right as Richie says, "You gotta open your eyes wider, Eddie-san," and Mike raises his eyebrows and mouths "Eddie-san" too, right there, on the downbeat.

Eddie, shame-faced and lead-tongued, would say it never happens again, but that would be giving himself too much credit.

+

Richie still stares at him, but it’s different now. Not like he’s sizing him up, but like he’s piecing him together. Like how Bill will keep his eyes on Bev whenever she visits, so that later in his sketchbook he can try to get the distance between her lips and her nose just right. Except Richie doesn’t draw anything besides dicks and balls and tits, and truth be told, he’s not nearly as good as Bill is at any of those. What he means to do with the spatial knowledge of chinky little bitchass Eddie Kaspbrak’s proportions is, well. It’s no one’s guess but Eddie’s. And Eddie is a bitchass, so he doesn’t guess. He lets it happen, but he doesn’t let himself guess.

"Whip it out, let me see you prove it," says Richie this time, but he doesn't squint or hot-dog his tongue in the way that curves his Ls into singsong Rs. Eddie looks back at him, at his Clark Kent glasses and his Clark Gable grin. It flickers, white picket teeth swinging shut, TV static over stock-still visage. Eyes settling wide and wary into their sockets, storm clouds over the wavering interstate terror of his mouth.

Who’s Eddie in this script? Long Duk Dong, Short Round, Bruce Lee. Good at math, but only because Mrs. Casey thinks he ought to be. Can't drive, but only because his mommy won't let him. Small, quiet, obedient, clean. Does everything his mommy asks. Is everything his mommy wanted.

"I brought you here. I chose you. Don’t you have everything you could possibly need?"

+

"Can I," says Richie, the first time, in the first timeline that they know each other, that Eddie realizes he’s always meant it.

They’re in Richie’s room, in Richie’s house, with Richie’s mother and father who look like him and act like him, who brought him kicking and screaming into this great birthright of the grand American Century. 

"Please," Richie says, as if he’s never wanted anything more in his life. The boy who wears his wants like a cape, on his knees in obsecration.

Eddie nods and says yes with his mouth and Richie pulls down the sweat-damp cotton of his shorts and wraps his pale pink hand around Eddie’s rosy pink rosary and he holds it in his palms in prayer.

After, Eddie’s eyes are glancing off the pump-action motion of the ball in his throat, just like when Richie bends over backwards under the water pump at the Hanlon farm because Mike’s grandpa says that’s how the water tastes the best. Eddie wants things that are the best, but he also wants things that are sterile, and so whenever it really comes down to it, he tries to let the latter win out. He holds onto Richie’s glasses as Richie limbos his head under the spigot, and he stares magnifying-glass burns into the dirt rather than watch the water stream down the smooth valley of Richie's drawn-out neck.

Eddie's watching now, though. Of course he is. The slick smack of Richie’s lips, magazine glossy with spit. It might be the best thing Eddie’s ever seen. They could make another Star Wars and Eddie still wouldn’t change theater screens, not when he can fit his thumb in the foxhole hollow above Richie’s top lip, right where Eddie’s shed his grace, draped sticky and sweet like the sugar glaze over the cinnamon rolls that Mrs. Tozier will sneak him home with in the morning.

"Touch me," Richie gasps, plain and plaintive.

Eddie pulls him up onto the comforter and they sit like that, Richie faced forward, eyes closed, fumbling his way into the fading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle print of his own boxers, one hand creasing up against Donatello’s shell, the other driving half-moon mortar craters into Eddie’s peninsular thigh. Eddie saying yes, again and again and again. Now with his fingers, now with his palms, now with the brittle carpal bones buried like landmines underneath the placemat skin of his wrist. Panning for it, in greedy, intemperate strokes. Richie’s bowing the scalloped rim of his casserole dish torso into the Cold War embrace of Eddie’s two arms, and Eddie’s touching him, just like he asked. Sifting all over the high Gateway Arch of his nose, the knobbly Mount Rushmore ridge of his spine, the Hoover Dam plane of his concaving chest. All over his marble Washington Monument skin. If Eddie could tear down handfuls of it and wear it plastered over his own, for a day, for a year, for one, two laudatory centuries, he thinks – he thinks that Richie would let him.

**Author's Note:**

> a few notes on time and US empire:  
> 1607: european settlers invade the coastal lands of the wabanaki people in present-day maine  
> 1658: settlers establish the port city of falmouth (present-day portland), the northernmost point of a shipping route for the kidnapping and sale of enslaved african people to the british colonies  
> 1947: stephen king is born in portland, maine  
> 1950: the united states invades the korean peninsula  
> 1955: evangelical christian couple bertha and harry holt adopt eight south korean children displaced by the korean war, ushering in the rise of international adoption to the united states  
> 1965: the united states invades southeast asia  
> 1974: stephen king publishes his first novel, carrie  
> 1975: end of the vietnam war  
> 1976: birth year of the losers club in the IT film series  
> 1986: stephen king publishes IT  
> 1988: events of IT: chapter one  
> 1991: end of the cold war


End file.
